Accession - List

For Immediate Release
April 4, 2001

Contact: Denise Horstman, (216) 707-2262

Jasper Johns 10-part Drawing is Centerpiece
of CMA Recent Acquisitions Display

CLEVELAND — Ten Numbers, a drawing that has represented the major 20th-century American artist
Jasper Johns in numerous exhibitions in the U.S., England, and Japan, is now installed as part of the
Cleveland Museum of Art's display of recent acquisitions, announced director Katharine Lee Reid
today. Until the museum purchased it in March, the 10-part work had been in the artist's own collection
since he created it in 1960.

Mrs. Reid says this purchase epitomizes her aims for growth in CMA's world-renowned
collection: "I want to build up the museum's 20th-century and contemporary collection with
masterpieces by our greatest artists — in all media. This iconic image by a living American artist, long
acknowledged as among the great masters of our time, is an important addition to our collection. Johns
broke with the long-held values of Western pictorial art that art lovers took for granted — illusionistic
representation of three-dimensional subjects, achieved with modeling and perspective. Ten Numbers is
the equivalent in importance in the latter half of the 20th century to works by Picasso in our collection in
the earlier half."

Johns (born 1 930) has been famous for decades now for the role his images — variations on the
American flag, targets, numbers, and alphabets — played in mid-20th-century Pop Art. He created Ten
Numbers at the age of about 30, just two years after his landmark show at the Castelli gallery in New
York in 1958. He drew the numerals 0 to 9 in vine charcoal (obtained from burnt grapevine sticks), each
on a separate sheet of paper, matted and framed separately. Each numeral is characterized by different
types of mark-making, involving dense, widely varied combinations of strokes; Johns used the charcoal
stick directly on the paper but also worked the media with brushes, erasers, and other tools, such as a
stump (a tightly rolled piece of paper used to spread out the media), and even his own fingers. He has
shown them in one long row or in two rows, with 0 through 4 above and 5 through 9 below.

Says Carter E. Foster, associate curator of drawings at the CMA: "This is one of Jasper Johns's
major drawings, and one of the greatest expressions of the 0 to 9 theme in his huge body of work. He

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transformed the "found" shapes of commercial stencils into richly worked visual objects, melding his cerebral
interest in the nature of visual perception with a sensuous, virtuoso approach to drawing."

Johns is represented by 18 other paintings, drawings, and prints in the collection, including the paintings
Reconstruction (1 959) and Usuyuki( 1977-78).

Important early photographs, other purchases, gifts

The Johns work is part of a group of new acquisitions that range in time and place of origin from Neolithic Pakistan
(about 2800-2500 BC) to 19th-century France to contemporary Japan.

Five photographs show the museum's interest in this great art form of the 19th and 20th centuries, newly
galvanized after Mrs. Reid determined to commit a full-time curator to photography.

• House in Pau (1 854) is a sidelong view of a stately old townhouse by the early amateur photographer, possibly
French, known mysteriously only as W.H.G. (the initials he or she wrote on negatives when dating them).

• Mother with Two Children (about 1855) by Jean-Baptiste Frenet (1814-1889) is from a small, recently discovered
group of photographs that are unprecedented in the history of the medium for their intimacy and animation. It
captures in a triangular composition (not unlike many Renaissance Madonna pictures) the sitters' familiarity,
through their poses, body language, and eye contact.

• 'Nehi' Billboard in a Field (1929), by Cleveland-born photographer and documentary filmmaker Ralph Steiner
(1899-1986), combines his dual interests in the unspoiled landscape and the transforming impact of signage and
advertising on American life.

• Two dramatically different works hint at the broad scope of the oeuvre of Edward Steichen (1879-1973), and
especially at his remarkable use of light: a Vanity Fair magazine close-up portrait of Paul Robeson as "The Emperor
Jones" { 1933) and a Coty lipstick advertising photograph — a glamorous shot of elegantly dressed models in a
fashionable room (1935).

From Neolithic India/Pakistan has come an earthenware Jar with Four ibexes, particularly accomplished in
its careful symmetry and ultra-thin walls. Its iron oxide decoration depicts four silhouettes of ibexes, beasts typical
for the area where this was made, whose horns merge into an elaborate spiral pattern. Also joining the CMA's
collection of Indian and Southeast Asian art is a bronze Cup from the 3rd to 2nd century BC (Maurya-Sunga period),
a very rare metal object from this time and place to survive. Detailed decoration — scroll-like and including
chariots, galloping animals, and human figures — covers the lower part of the vessel.

A Turkish silk velvet has been acquired that was designed and woven at the height of the Ottoman Empire
in the late 1500s, undoubtedly for use by the sultan in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul given its very high quality. Its
elegant pattern displays large medallions decorated with flowers in a curving ogival lattice bearing rosettes and
crowns that were woven with costly gold thread and highlighted with less expensive silver thread on a lush maroon
velvet ground. The textile juxtaposes large designs of tulips, palmette leaves, pomegranates, and crowns in both

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bold motifs that are readily visible from a distance and delicate patterns that can only be admired up close. Probably
meant as upholstery fabric for a divan (sofa) rather than as cloth for an imperial kaftan, this piece is more than five
feet long.

Five prints, drypoints by American artist Milton Avery (1885-1965), make up the Laurels Portfolio Number
Four{ 1948), considered the most important of four sets of prints issued 1947-1948 by the Laurel Gallery in New
York: Riders in the Park, Head of a Man, Umbrella by the Sea, March at a Table, and Nude with Long Torso. Avery's
favorite motifs — landscape, seascape, and the human figure — are delineated in these works with the artist's
trademark economy of line and simplicity of form.

T. Dixon Long, a longtime supporter of the CMA's activities in assembling a collection of modern Japanese
ceramics, has given 21 examples by seven artists, most of whom are still living. They include vessels by well-known
20th-century masters as well as young practitioners.

Additional purchases and gifts include the following:

• An elaborately decorated gilded silver ewer from about 1845 was made by Jean-Valentin Morel (1794-1860),
perhaps based on a design by his well-known contemporary, Jules Dieterle (1811-1889).

• Harvey and Penelope D. Buchanan have given ten major Pop Art prints, which they bought when they were
issued in the 1960s, such as Robert Indiana's Loveand works by Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy
Warhol; they also gave a lithograph by Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) from the estate of Edgar Degas.

• Francesco Piranesi (1758-1810), son of the more celebrated printmaker Giovanni Piranesi, created a light-filled
scene of tourists exploring ruins, The Temple of Isis at Pompeii (1788), as an etching, hand-colored with watercolor
by Desprez.

On view now are the Johns; W.H.G. and Frenet photographs; velvet; ewer; Neolithic jar; and bronze cup.

The textile and works on paper will be replaced with other recent acquisitions the week of April 30, 2001.

Picasso Blue Period Masterwork on Loan to CMA

La Celestina (The Procuress) has been on loan here since late February 2001 from the Musee National Picasso, Paris,
on special exchange for The Harem, one of Picasso's great Rose Period works, which CMA has loaned to the the
Galerie National du Jeu de Paume (Paris) and Montreal Museum of Fine Arts venues of the exhibition Picasso
Erotique. La Celestina, one of Picasso's most famous Blue Period paintings, will be on view here until about
September 15, 2001. In this portrait, Picasso's recurring subject of Carlota Valdivia, an old woman who "procured"
prostitutes for clients, rests her intense gaze on the viewer with one seeing eye and one disturbingly clouded blind
eye. The Harem will be returned to view at CMA in late September.

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